Anchee Min - Red Azalea

Comrade Jiang Ching needn’t worry about her opponents, I said. She is the standard-bearer, China’s modern empress. I am sure that the power she holds is beyond anyone’s imagining. The Supervisor smiled. You really think so? His smile carried a message. The message was written in an unbreakable code which I could not interpret. How strange, I started to think, a supervisor who has no name, who swims in and out of the studio at will, who rounds his tongue with the country’s most powerful names. Why was he interested in coming to the smoking room? Why did he speak with me? Why did he keep asking me to speak of my true thoughts? I remembered that many people disappeared after they had exposed their minds.

We sat smoking. The streetlamp outlined the contours of the Supervisor’s face. He stood next to the window, looking up at the moon. What thoughts was he burying up there?

My life greened. It greened because the Supervisor was taking an interest in me. Each day I looked forward to provoking him. I kept telling myself that it was not going to change anything, but I would not let the attention I was getting slip away. The Supervisor began talking to me in public. He talked to me on and off of sets, in front of Cheering Spear, in front of Soviet Wong. We talked about the shooting board, the makeup, the costumes and the props. We talked in private as well, on the stairways, in the smoking room. I told him my version of Red Azalea. I showed him that I was a Red Azalea by nature. He looked at me, stunned. He was stunned by my craziness. I said though I did not know how to ride a horse, I knew how to drive a tractor. I told him that a tractor runs faster than a horse. He must see that I had an engine and Cheering Spear did not. I said I would like to entwine the ivy of my confidence around his nerves. I shouted at him, though in a silent voice, Don’t you see I could be what you wanted?

The Supervisor went quiet on the set. He stopped talking to me. But I knew something was happening in him. I knew I had made him interested in me. I knew I was gaining a comrade. I sobbed, awake, at midnight, dreaming of Yan for the first time in a long time. I wrote to Yan and told her about the Supervisor.

The last of the shooting was done. Thinking of the coming farewell, I felt sick, as if a secret wish that had been cherished was going to be aborted. As I lay on the bed in my hotel room, I warned myself that the crew would soon be dispersed. The movie Red Azalea would be done. The Supervisor would be gone. Nothing more would happen to me. My effort would be wasted, like a ripple in that lake. A sudden sadness rained inside of me.

I was lying on the hotel bed wrapped up in thoughts of the Supervisor when the costume designer came in. She was a pleasant woman of about thirty who had the face of a Buddha. She told me that Cheering Spear had invited the Supervisor for a farewell dinner in a Russian-style restaurant near the lake. She suggested that we go to visit a Buddhist temple hidden in the mountain range in the east of the province. My mind kept picturing Cheering Spear and the Supervisor sitting together chatting. The costume designer told me that the temple was best known for granting wishes. I did not care about the wishes, but I needed to get out of the room.

Looking up from the foot of the mountain, the temple was located in the middle of the clouds. A carved-stone stairway led up to the temple. The stairway was narrow. It could only hold one person. It felt like walking in a stone glove. The inscription on a memorial tablet said it took four generations of stone carvers to complete the staircase.

Tiny old ladies, toothless, carrying food bags, were making their way up. They bowed, heads hitting the stone stairway at every step.

The costume designer and I finally arrived at the temple’s gate by three o’clock in the afternoon. The temple was entwined in ivy. The air was chilly and filled with the smell of jasmine. The smoke from a huge bronze incense burner lingered and drifted around the shoulders of the worshipers. Through a long hallway there was an altar, carved from sandalwood. In front of the altar a line of primitive-looking stuffed dolls, about three hundred of them, male and female, painted colorfully, were sitting under the feet of the Buddha statue.

An old lady, hairless, her body totally soaked in sweat, got on her knees. Her face was coated with brown mud from the bowing ritual. She took out a red-and-green-colored stuffed doll and a ballpoint pen, and wrote some characters on the back of the doll. She put the doll in the rank and bowed to the Buddha statue endlessly. The sound of her head hitting the floor remained in my ear for a long time. I slowly approached her doll to take a look at what she had written. It said: Dear God of Birth. I have taken a doll from you and you granted me a marvelous grandchild. Now I have made another pretty doll to give back to you. I can never thank you enough. Your sincere follower. Mother of your child Big Bolt.

My fingers were trembling as I went to light the incense. For the first time, I sincerely bowed to the Buddha statue. I did not know what to wish. I rose to look at the statue. Tell me what to wish, I prayed. In the smoke I was shocked to hear my heart say, Please, Buddha, make me strong, make me strong. At that moment I realized my weakness. It was a weakness over the intrusion of a particular man. I got up in panic: I realized that my heart was longing for the Supervisor. I looked around and tried to find the costume designer, but she had disappeared. I kept looking. Suddenly, my eyes met his, the Supervisor’s. He was in the crowd, his eyes following me. He looked away the moment our eyes collided. I made a move. Men and women with the stuffed dolls in their hands kept rushing in. They bowed, acting with abandon, as if no one was present. The sound of their praying spread and mixed with the sound of monks singing.

Another wave of people floated in. The number of stuffed dolls on the altar increased. The sound of worshipers getting down on their knees, the sound was loud like beating drums. I was pushed by the human flow to the back of the altar, where there was a wall of a thousand statues of the Buddha prophets. Painted ceramic clouds filled up the scene, under the prophets’ feet, on their palms, around their heads. A running deer with a red ribbon around its neck; a straw basket of peaches. A floor-long white beard swaying in the breeze. The smiles obscure. A realm where senses are disfigured. I turned as my whole being was absorbed by a gazing, a gazing from behind me, from him, the Supervisor.

I lost my mind in the clouds. My hand reached back toward him as if acting of its own will. I was dragged by it. It swam through the crowd’s layers of flesh and suddenly was touched and tightly held by the other hand.

Without looking, I knew it was he. I looked at the statues of the Buddha prophets, hearing my heart cry out in joy.

As the crowd moved through, the hand let go. I turned around to look. About four feet away, he stood, as if nailed there, looking at me. He was deathly pale. Everything began to fade in front of me but his bright almond eyes. The deer with the red ribbon began to run, the peaches swayed low on the branches, the prophets continued their obscure smiling.

Two men in security-guard uniforms appeared. They rushed through the crowd and approached him. They spoke to him, looking around. They asked him whether he was well. He shook his hands impatiently and pointed them down the hill. The men were polite but refused to leave. They stood, locked. He turned toward the sky, chin tilted up. I saw extreme sadness in the almond eyes.

The costume designer reappeared. She complained about my slowness. She said she had made a wish for herself and felt much better now. She suggested we go to the dark underground cave, the Yellow Dragon Cave. It was said that millions of years ago a dragon died here and the narrow tunnel of the entrance was the shell of its intestines.